Sweeten
by Tiamat's Child
Summary: All the perfumes of Arabia…


Title: Sweeten

Author: Tiamat's Child

E-Mail: tiamats_child@yahoo.com

Rating: PG-13

Series: X/1999

Characters: Kusanagi

Summary: All the perfumes of Arabia…

Sweeten

"All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Macbeth: Act 5, scene 1

Your hands don't feel any cleaner.

You've been washing them all evening, and you can still feel the dust and blood. It's still engraved in your skin. That paste it made, a mud of gypsum dust and human blood, has entered into your deep memory. It was so very dark, the red of the blood only a trifle diluted by the white of the dust.

Your hands still know the weight of the girl when you lifted her up to carry her out to the paramedics. The way her body draped, the head lolling far, far too loose, is settled at the base of your brain. It will never leave. She had a broken neck. Her death had been swift, and far more merciful than you could have hoped. Those other wounds of hers would have killed her just as surely, but far more slowly. It took you much too long to get there.

Your clothes were soaked with her blood. You can still feel the clinging dampness of it against your skin. You'll have to burn those garments, though the thought of touching them again makes you shudder with every muscle in your body. Perhaps one of your friends will do it for you. You don't know if you could bear to do it yourself.

The girl looked like your little missy, didn't she? For a moment when you saw that small, delicate form crumpled on the floor you thought you'd lost her. You can't stop thinking about it now. What if she does die? And how odd to cradle a corpse that way, and scarce be able to tell it from one that you love.

Your hands are so filthy. The water hurts them now, when you run it over them, but they're still filthy. You can't see the stain anymore, but it's there. You know it. You feel it. You have to get your hands clean. So you keep scrubbing.

It wasn't you who brought the building down. No. Of course not. You'd never do anything like that. Perhaps the people of this city do deserve death and judgement, but it is not your place to give it to them. It is wrong for people to claim that right. It doesn't belong to them. You'd never take it.

But, then, you didn't do anything to stop it either. Did you? And you might have stopped it had you tried. But you didn't try. Some part of you didn't want to make it stop. That part that dies a little more each day, breathing poisoned air, walking on concrete slabs that imprison the soil, and listening, eternally listening, to the grief filled screams of the Earth. That part of you revels in the destruction of the planet's encircling bonds.

The Earth's cries never leave your mind, do they? No. They stay, echoing constantly, always fresh and new. You must always hear the planet's sorrow and terror. Is it any wonder you do nothing?

It is painful for you, to be torn in two this way, is it not? One must die to save the other, and you love both equally. You would save the tree strangling to death in a too small bit of earth, but you would also save the child trapped in the rubble of her world. You cannot save both. Yet you will not sacrifice one to the other.

So it is that you do not act. You exist balanced on a pinnacle studded with razored diamonds. You dare not move, lest you fall, for the ground is far below on either side, but it is not easy to stay where you are. You are torn at by ice-laden winds, and your skin is sliced open so you bleed and slick the surface upon which you stand. You do not remain unharmed.

The water is tinted pink now, pink with swirls of darker red. Your hands are slick and stained. You'd best stop. Someone might notice.

Your hands are marked with thick trails of living red that twine around your fingers like scared serpents. They hurt, a nasty, burning pain that crawls over your flesh like a living thing, a fast growing moss. You keep washing.

If you could learn to walk on clouds, then you could leave your pinnacle and not fall. But you cannot walk on clouds. One of the things that you love must end. Mayhap both will. But if they do, it will not be because you chose it so.

And nothing, nothing, can ever sweeten that.


End file.
